Myths about the Holodomor
Every year on the last Saturday of November, Ukraine honors the memory of the victims of the Holodomor, the act of genocide of the Ukrainian people committed by the Soviet Union in 1932-1933. Stalin, who believed that the peasantry was the basis of the national movement, attacked the Ukrainian peasants as the bearers of Ukrainian tradition, culture, and language. Through starvation, the Soviet authorities tried to force Ukrainians to accept Bolshevik rule, to finally eliminate Ukrainian resistance to the regime and attempts to build an independent state.
In 1932, the Soviet authorities established an unrealistic plan for Ukraine: to bake 356 million poods of bread (approximately 5 billion 831 million kilograms), which was personally monitored by Soviet party figures Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov. At the same time, in the early 1930s, the policy of collectivization in Ukraine collapsed — peasants left the collective farms en masse and took their property. To preserve collective farms and property in the hands of the state, on August 7, 1932, the regime adopted a repressive decree, popularly known as the "Law of Five Spikelets" — all collective farm property was equated with state property, and its theft was punishable. According to this law, Ukrainian peasants could be imprisoned for 10 years with confiscation of property or shot for collecting crop residues in the field.
Between 1932 and 1933, several million people died in Ukraine. It is difficult to determine the exact number of those who died as a result of the Holodomor because the Soviet authorities forbade recording the real number of deaths. On November 28, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the law "On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine", which interprets the events of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. Today, only 21 countries in the world recognize the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
However, Russia still uses propaganda to spread fake stories about the events of those years. Together with the Museum of the Holodomor, we debunk them.
Myth 1. The Holodomor was not artificially organized
First, the Soviet government, and now the Russian one, is trying in every way to deny the fact that the Holodomor was a purposeful policy. Russia is trying to disclaim responsibility; back in 2008, Vladimir Putin stated that "Russia does not raise issues of a far-fetched nature, such as the Holodomor, politicizing these common problems of the past." Instead, Russia spreads the thesis that the food "difficulties" in the USSR were also outside the borders of Ukraine, and the famine was also in the Volga region, the Kuban, and the North Caucasus.
However, several facts contradict this theory:
- Until the 20th century in Ukraine, not a single case of mass starvation was found, let alone one that would be a consequence of natural disasters.
- In 1932-1933, there were no atmospheric anomalies that could have caused a famine in Ukraine with millions of victims.
- There was no famine in western Ukraine, part of which was then part of Poland.
- There was no famine in the regions of Russia that bordered Ukraine, but there was a famine in those regions where Ukrainians made up the majority of the population: the Kuban, some regions of the northern Caucasus, and Lower and Middle Volga regions.
- Moscow's definition of impossible grain procurement plans for Ukraine became the trigger for the Holodomor outbreak in 1932–1933. In addition, the USSR introduced mechanisms that took absolutely all kinds of food from the peasants.
- At that time, the USSR was actively exporting bread abroad and trying to hide the famine in Ukraine from the international community.
These facts prove that the Soviet Union committed the genocide of Ukrainians in particular.
Myth 2. Holodomor is not genocide of Ukrainians
In 1944, Rafał Lemkin coined the term "genocide," which is a coordinated plan of actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of their destruction. The aim of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups, as well as the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the people belonging to such groups. Lemkin's definition of genocide would later form the basis of the UN Genocide Convention.
In 2009, the Security Service of Ukraine instituted a criminal proceeding, as a result of which the pre-trial investigation and the court established that the Holodomor was aimed at destroying the main part of the gene pool of the Ukrainian ethnic group — the peasants because according to the 1926 census, ethnic Ukrainians made up 88% of the rural population. The investigators collected 330 volumes of the criminal case and established that during 1932-1933 the top leadership of the USSR and its proteges in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as their representatives on the ground, artificially created the conditions for the mass physical destruction of peasants in Ukraine.
Given the circumstances, the Holodomor of 1932-1933 falls under Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, and is the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Myth 3. The USSR did not plan to starve Ukrainian peasants to death, since in 1932 the state leadership halved the plan for grain procurement for Ukraine and provided food aid
Historians prove that the grain procurement plan was adjusted in August and November 1932, even though as of June, the territory of the Holodomor covered at least 100 administrative districts with a population of about 9 million people. However, in June 1932, Stalin refused to provide food aid to the Ukrainian countryside and to reduce the grain procurement plan to reasonable limits. At that time, it was still possible to avert the Holodomor.
Myth 4. The Holodomor did not exist because several Western intellectuals did not notice its existence
The USSR sought to hide the scale of its crime. Moscow used former French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot, world-famous writers Romain Rolland, Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells, and The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty to spread disinformation about the state of affairs in Ukraine.
Bernard Shaw, who visited the USSR in 1931, stated that he had not seen hungry children and exhausted adults. In his material for March 31, 1933, Duranty denied the fact of the Holodomor and asserted that in Ukraine and the USSR in general "there is neither hunger nor starvation deaths."
British journalist Gareth Jones was the first to write in the Western press about mass starvation in Ukraine.
Myth 5. Ukrainians did not resist the Holodomor
Ukrainian peasants resorted to both active and passive resistance across the entire territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In the summer and autumn of 1932, the peasants, first of all, tried to save part of the grain for the winter from the grain harvest. For this, according to historians, they massively built secret pits. In the autumn of the same year, a large part of the peasants tried to move to the city, where the food situation was relatively better. At the same time, in 1932, peasants en masse refused to work in the collective farms.
In addition, Ukrainian peasants actively distributed leaflets with calls to resist the Soviet authorities and collective farms, and the most radical forms of resistance were the burning of collective farm buildings and the property of authorized persons. However, the resistance of the peasants did not gain such scope to stop the genocide. Peasant demonstrations were local, were limited to specific villages, and did not spill over into an all-Ukrainian liberation movement.
However, the Ukrainian struggle continues!
